Clean Eating Rye Bread Recipe

Bakers in most countries make bread with various milled wheat gains. In Scandinavia, it is relatively cold, so grain-like rye is much better suited for the climate. So that means we commonly use rye flour, and most commonly in bread. This is my Danish rye bread recipe.

Here in Denmark, rye bread is a staple of our cuisine. Almost everyone eats it for lunch every day. It’s dark, it’s malty, and it’s usually full of delicious moist seeds.

Easy

The type of rye bread is pretty different from what people in other countries think is rye bread. It’s because it’s made with 100% rye flour, whereas in most other places, people bake rye bread with a mixture of wheat and rye.

Best Healthy Soft Seedy Sandwich Bread

The rye grain originates from present-day Turkey but came to Denmark through merchants and has been grown in Denmark for over 1000 years.

The Danish people have been baking rye bread all that time, although, in earlier times, bread was probably a lot less palatable than modern bread. This article describes it as coarse, baked using unsifted flour, lumpy, sour, and often half moldy. Yikes.

There’s even a concept called the Rye bread border. It describes an invisible border that cuts through Europe, where, below the border, people do not eat bread made with rye. I am all for expanding this border.

Easy Overnight Dark Rye Bread

A bread with 100% rye is a whole-grain bread. It’s much healthier than your typical wheat bread. It has fewer carbohydrates, more fibers, and generally fills your stomach nicely (per calorie eaten).

Here is a breakdown of the macronutrients of commercial white toast, commercial whole-grain toast, my Sourdough bread for beginners, and this rye bread. The rye bread may seem a bit high in fat, but that’s the good stuff from the seeds.

This bread requires a pretty wet starter. You can either use your existing wheat sourdough starter at 100% hydration or a 166% hydration rye starter that you’ve saved from the levain from a previous bread.

Homemade Easy Rye Bread

Making the levain with your wheat starter requires some extra water to get the hydration to 166%. The first time you make this rye sourdough starter (or levain), it will contain 44 grams of wheat flour from your starter. If you keep this levain and use it, that amount will fall to almost zero in 3 or 4 bakes.

If you use your rye starter at 166% hydration, less water is needed to keep the hydration of the levain at 166%:

The dough has 400 grams of rye flour and a good amount of salt. We use 500 grams of water to soak the seeds, but this does not add to the dough’s hydration. We soak so that the seeds won’t take out hydration of the dough and keep them nice and supple.

Irish Soda Bread

If you want to play with the hydration or the formula in general, you can do it here in my bread calculator.

Combine 125g/1 cup of dark ale and 125g/1 scant cup of dark brown sugar in a pot. Bring it to a boil, and then let it simmer uncovered until you have a very thick syrup. You can use this syrup in place of barley malt syrup.

Danish

This is classic Danish rye bread. It’s a staple of Danish cuisine. You will find this at any lunch and even at the celebration lunches we eat for Easter and Christmas, including other Danish specialties like liver pâté, pickled herring, and

Dark Rye Bread

This bread is perfect for any Danish-inspired lunch. The bread has a soft crust, a dense but soft crumb, a nice chew, and a slight crunch from the moist seeds.

The taste is delicious. Slightly sour from the starter, but not overwhelming. A fantastic full taste from rye flour and malty notes. It’s just perfect for open-faced sandwiches.

There are so many different variations of smørrebrød that it is hard to list them all, but I will give you the most iconic ones that you will find in

Easy No Fail Whole Wheat Bread

Egg and shrimp – Rye bread, butter, lettuce, hard-boiled egg, shrimp from Greenland, mayonnaise, caviar, garden cress, a piece of tomato, and top it with a slice of lemon

Fish filet with shrimp – Rye bread, butter, lettuce, a freshly seared fish filet with a rye coating, remoulade, shrimp from Greenland, garden cress, a piece of tomato, and top it with a slice of lemon

This

Flæskesteg – Rye bread, butter, lettuce, pork roast, crispy pork crackling, pickled red cabbage, pickled cucumbers, garden cress, and a slice of orange

Light Rye Bread (no Knead, Overnight Recipe)

Ham – Rye bread, butter, lettuce, thinly sliced ham, scrambled eggs, asparagus, julienne carrots, garden cress, and a piece of fresh cucumber on the top.

There are many more, but these are the most common ones on rye bread. There are quite a few for white bread, but that will be for a different day.

This is my recipe for Danish rye bread. I hope you will try to bake it. If you bake it and post it on Instagram, please tag me as @ so I can see your creations. That will make me happy.

Danish Rye Bread

Rye is a grain that thrives in the relatively cold environment in Scandinavia, so that means that bread made using rye flour is common in Denmark. This is my recipe for dark, malty sourdough rye bread with rye kernels and pumpkin seeds.So it’s happened, after some resistance I finally fell into the sourdough hole and I could not be more obesessed. I guess it’s no surprise. I loved chemistry as a kid until an awful teacher took over. She would say rubbish like:

Anyway, I digress. So what got me hooked on sourdough was a bit of homesickness and the realisation how much I miss rye bread I grew up on. Rye breads – there are literally hundreds of traditional recipes – are a true staple of Northern, Central and Eastern European diets, but not very popular here in the UK so I knew that if I wanted a taste of home I had to make my sourdough rye bread myself.

Rye

Like all good sourdough breads, rye sourdough starts with a bubbly starter. Sourdough starter is essentially a culture of wild yeast and gut-friendly bacteria that is a result of fermentation process. All you need to make a starter is quality flour (wholemeal flour – rye or wheat – which has a much higher mineral content, is most reliable), non-chlorinated water, time and a bit of care. That Guinness advert from over a decade ago –

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– hit the nail on the head. A starter takes approximately 7 days of waiting and daily feeding before you are able to harness its bubbly goodness in making your first sourdough.

After your starter is ready, all you need to do is mix some of it up with flour, water and eventually salt and wait a bit to allow wild yeast to aerate the dough, bake the bread and wait some more for it to settle. If it sounds like there is a lot of waiting and twiddling your thumbs, it’s because there is! But don’t worry, apart from some stirring and a bit of patience, this is a pretty hands-off way to get a beautiful sourdough rye bread on your table. Your patience will be rewarded with a delicious, complex flavour loaf. It will be crispy on the outside and moist and soft on the inside, with a great crunch of some added seeds. It offers a great nutritional alternative to white bread too. I love this bread, especially lighly toasted and topped with a range of sweet and savoury toppings and I hope you will too.

If you are a beginner, don’t worry. This is a perfect sourdough to get started on. It is ridiculosly simple to make as there is no kneading or shaping required. The process is more akin to making a cake albeit with very minimal ingredients. Yet, as opposed to a cake, it is not that easy to mess this bread up. You don’t need to be careful with folding flour into the wet ingredients or vigilant when it comes to taking the loaf out of the oven the minute it’s ready, this dough is very forgiving and 5-10 minutes longer in the oven won’t ruin it.

Homemade Rye Bread Healthy Clean Eating Stock Photo 2321447613

If you make this recipe please tag me on Instagram using the # hashtag and @. I love seeing your takes on my recipes!

Below are all of the key ingredients that go into this simple sourdough rye bread, with the exception of sunflower seeds. Sunflower seeds can be omitted or replaced with a different seed: pumpkin, sesame, flaxseed or even chopped nuts.

Clean

What is helpful to remember is that the ratios of the main ingredients in this recipe are: 1 : 1 : 1 : 2, meaning 1 part sourdough starter, 1 part rye flour, 1 part wheat flour and 2 parts water. Remembering this formula will enable you to easily increase the volume of your bread to match the size of the bread tin you own.

Easy Whole Wheat Bread

SOURDOUGH STARTER: I made a starter with wholemeal rye flour and it took 7 days of feeding before I was able to bake my first loaf. I followed this regimen and